


Draw the Patterns Out

by LittleRaven



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 15:56:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20473658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: It's possible that all stories began in caves. If so, Polly would understand.





	Draw the Patterns Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rthstewart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rthstewart/gifts).

Polly could not say if she’d always wanted to be a writer. She thought she was perhaps far too young for that. It would be easy for her mother or father to say, “I remember when you were four years old and you wanted to be a nurse,” and other things like that. She could hardly argue. She didn’t know what she’d wanted in a time she couldn’t remember, and she preferred to avoid silly arguments. What mattered was, she was writing now, and she found she rather liked it. 

Memory, she decided, was important, but not nearly as much as observing; you had to get good at observing things, or what was the point of remembering them? Writing was good for both. Polly watched things, like curious little children generally did, but she also liked paying closer attention to them. She would think over them, by herself. Soon tired of not being able to find a moment’s peace to do it—for grown-ups like to see children busy, fearing what a thoughtful expression might mean—she made a cave in her attic, and she went there every day to do her thinking. She would play outside too, and do her watching, but then she would go to that quiet place she’d built herself, let the watching play out in her mind, and write. 

She liked stories of the garden, of the trees and the little creatures that live in their roots, or in the bushes. It was the kind of story she had never stopped liking to read, even if she no longer quite believed in them; this hardly mattered, when she could write them herself. The tree roots, the tangle of bushes, the dewy leaves in the morning—she was often up quite early just to watch them shine as best as she could from her bedroom window, and sometimes she would even sneak outside the house to see them up close, though it was difficult not to get caught as she went, or later as she tried to return, or forgot until she was found sitting in her bedclothes on the grass. Polly did not climb, as she feared she would not be forgiven for it, so she stared up to where the birds lived wondering what else lived there, and what it would be like if the branches tangled in her hair and kept her up without it hurting, so she could see. That wondering took shape in her papers, and she spoke of it to no one. 

When she had a friend at last, a neighbor she could actually talk to, it was easier not to change this. It never even occurred to her, until Digory asked. Of course, she said no. Would you share your private thoughts with someone, all your thoughts, just because they asked? 

“It’s not a diary. If it were a diary, why would I have let you find out about it?” Polly thought this was the most obvious thing in the world.

Digory, who seemed like he was more used to running about outside than sitting writing anyway, conceded the point and did not keep asking why he couldn’t see it then. Instead, he brought up the tunnel. 

Polly seized the opportunity. It sounded so much easier to explore together than to do it alone herself. She quite liked the idea of taking a candle—partially melted of course—and going through a quiet house, but she was not quite foolish enough to do it on her own. She read stories, after all. Already one began to take shape in her mind. Two children, no grown-ups to protect them or tell them what to do and have the adventure for them, and the wood creaking around them, whispering about the people who had lived in it, and about what its own life had been like before that, when it was trees drinking water from the earth. 

She could not have imagined—and her imagination was not to be underestimated—that taking a present from her neighbor Mr. Ketterley, an old man who said nice things, and was therefore to be deferred to on two counts, according to the rules of good behavior for little girls, would take her to another kind of wood entirely. 

It was a beautiful wood. More beautiful than any she had ever seen, or at least she would have thought so if she could remember seeing other woods before. Polly felt quite certain that she had never before seen a tree, or felt grass, and even if she had it wasn’t worth remembering now she had the trees and the grass here. She lay back, and listened to them grow. 

She felt quite at home doing it, as if it were something she had always done, which of course was not completely false, but not completely true either. For a time, she forgot to think about whether this was the case. If asked, she wouldn’t have been able to say how long that time was; “you’d think time passed there, what with the trees growing,” she said later. “Growing needs time. But it didn’t look like anything had ever needed to happen there, even if it must have. I got there before Digory, and so there must have been time, but you wouldn’t be able to tell it from looking.”

“I wonder what happened to the guinea pig,” she added. “The poor creature was taken there the same way I was. I wanted to get it back, and I would have—only it would’ve gone straight back to that Mr. Ketterley, and who knows what more might’ve been done to it then. Still, we didn’t see it again, any of the other times we went back to that place. It couldn’t have traveled anywhere, without rings. I hope it was very happy, even if it was alone for the rest of its life.”

Her face, lost in that thought, could already be seen to have begun playing out the guinea pig’s adventures, and never mind what she’d already said about how nothing ever happened in that wood. 

Which of course, wasn’t quite true. Polly had happened to that wood, and Digory after her, and several worlds’ worth of things after that. She said it freely, though not to everyone—as not everyone could be told—because the adventure had not been private. Digory could speak to that, and so could everyone else involved, though they wouldn’t be able to tell anybody in this world anyway. 

Polly had happened, and had been happened to, and she wrote more than ever. If she could talk about it, she decided, and write about it, then she could see no harm in sharing her other written stories too, the kind which wouldn’t make her think about who would believe her and who wouldn’t. So she did, and since adventures were not done with her or Digory once they returned to our world for good, she found a good many stories were to follow, and a good many people beyond her friends to read them.


End file.
